The absence of a comprehensive smart city governance model has prompted research into the characteristics of the relationships among cities, services, and stakeholders. This study aims to identify, from the perspectives of governance and sociotechnical systems, the characteristics of conceptually related smart city service implementations based on stakeholder partnerships. Social network analysis was utilized based on existing research datasets. Stakeholders, services, and representative European sustainable smart cities were included in the dataset in relation to this study’s operational definition. The first finding is that the initial conceptually related smart city services are reflected in the accumulated and current characteristics of the smart city services. These depend on stakeholder partnerships, while the network foundation differs between the initial and latter services. The second finding clarifies how different development services depend on stakeholder partnerships and how multiple stakeholders, including local entities, are vital to deal with current challenges in massive urbanizations. The third finding demonstrates the emerging roles of private sectors and some intermediate services in the global network of cities. This study contributes to the management of smart cities by identifying how service development occurs based on stakeholder partnerships and contributes to their theoretical basis by empirically demonstrating the importance of multi-stakeholder partnerships to address current urbanization challenges.

A smart city has developed gradually with the evolution of services and ICT technologies to achieve sustainability. Many academic and governmental documents reference this; however, there is no existing theoretical or empirical study on the characteristics of smart city services regarding sustainability. In this sense, this study aims to clarify characteristics of Conceptually Related Smart Cities (CRSCs) services from sustainability. The methodologies adopt a matrix taxonomy to sort the previous indicators in the first step. It also utilizes a keyword analysis based on a literature review to identify the characteristics of two concepts. Three outcomes result from the steps of theoretical structures. Firstly, this study develops SSC service indicators based on the synthesis of Sustainable Smart City (SSC) and Smart City and sustainable city. The second outcome is an identification of the relation between SSC services and Conceptually Related Smart Cities. Lastly, the study clarifies the significance of citizen engagement based on the evolutionary concept by typifying service development in the lens of sustainability in CRSCs. This study is worthwhile for understanding smart city services and managing different featured smart cities from a sustainability perspective.

Sustainable smart cities (SSCs) have developed various services and technologies with multi-stakeholderism under multiple names. The characteristics of SSCs are specified by implementing conceptually related smart cities (CRSCs), which are ICT-based transformative cities. Many scholars point out that in-depth empirical studies of CRSCs are necessary to clarify the nature of the sociotechnical transition of SSCs while avoiding the oversimplified narratives of techno-utopia. Utilizing a periodic matrix taxonomy, this study aims to examine empirical characteristics of CRSCs services’ socio-technical transformation from international perspectives. The target cities were sampled using cluster sampling through three screening steps based on four representative documents reflecting the critical aspects of the operational definition of SSCs. The city-level data were collected using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocol and preprocessed with coding and weighting to create a periodic matrix taxonomy. The outcomes are the commonalities and different services’ sociotechnical transitions of sampled European cities from perspectives of multi-stakeholderism. The outcomes have managerial implications demonstrating empirically the sequences of service transformation of European megacities. Theoretical implications for the existing theories also arise through empirical analysis of historical real-city data and specification of stakeholders’ partnerships in conceptually related smart cities.